Rumor has it we might get another female character in Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie. While y’all know my feelings on the subject of the awesomeness of She-Hulk, I do find the suggestion that the lady in question be Maria Hill interesting. One of the things that was best about The Incredibles was the ways it teased out the infrastructure that superheroes need to do their work, from... 

Sorry, guys, got tied up with work. Lots to say on Monday, I promise.  Read More »

It really is remarkable how tipping points work in Hollywood. Sam Worthington stars in Avatar, and without any particular consideration of his performance, he suddenly has to be in everything. Tom Hardy, despite years of solid British movie and television work, including a critically acclaimed arty turn in Bronson, shows up in Inception, and suddenly he’s in everything from a Prohibition movie... 

Well, it’s not a full-on superheroine movie, and it’s not the She-Hulk television show I sometimes dream that Joss Whedon and David Kelley will get drunk and try to create. But I’m glad to see the CW is making a series about a superpowered teenage girl. The fact that the dude helming the show has done work on the intriguing combination of Buffy, The Shield, Without a Trace and... 

Sorry for the delay today, folks. In between the end of the holidays and moving, I’m running behind on everything. Starting tomorrow, there will be some familiar faces helping out here for the rest of the week (and I’ll be around, too). Over the Thanksgiving break, my brother took me to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I. I’ve long felt some ambivalence about the... 

You know what might be interesting?  A movie where Angelina Jolie played twitchy and nervous but ultimately effective, and Johnny Depp played calm and collected to the point of ridiculousness. This is not that movie: Oh, and where Paul Bettany played something other than menacing. With the exception of voice work in cartoons, and maybe Franky in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, it’s... 

One of the reasons British shows and movies about journalists are so great is that the English accept a raffishness in reporters and editors that we Americans normally only deem acceptable in cops. Which is the main reason I’m so excited to hear that Dominic West is playing a journalist in a high-end British television series. Take Dan Foster from State of Play: Add some muscle mass, and subtract... 

I like Natalie Portman just fine, but it strikes me as somewhat characteristic that she’d mistake writing and starring in movies about ladies who like to have sex as somehow raunchy and edgy. As much as she’s done interesting work in movies like Closer and now The Black Swan, she’s always seemed to have a somewhat bland, commercial streak. Sure, her lines in the Star Wars prequels... 

I went to see Morning Glory on Friday with a group of female journalist friends, including Shani Hilton and Latoya Peterson. I think we expected it to be a guilty pleasure, a lot of Rachel McAdams being adorable, Patrick Wilson being delicious, and Harrison Ford being grumpy, and of course it was all of those things. But we found ourselves howling in the theater; I can’t remember the last... 

The big selling point of Pink’s video for “Raise Your Glass” was supposed to be the image of her officiating at a same-sex wedding. Instead, the video’s kind of a mess of mixed messages, and the one that comes through most clearly is actually one of animal-rights advocacy: Pink has a tendency to do this: she likes to do mixed narratives with a party montage in which a theoretically...